The Ricochet Podcast - Hot For Cleveland

Episode Date: September 23, 2022

Today we cover breaking news and the hardly recognizable past. Toby Young joins at the top to to tell us about his personal experience with PayPal’s shot at free speech. Later, our old pal Troy Senik returns to give Grover Cleveland the reassessment he deserves. (Get a copy of Troy’s book here!) Peter, James and Charlie (Rob’s sub for the day) chew over the FBI given whistleblower Kyle Seraphin’s... Source

So I told him that I am taller than George Washington, the greatest hero in history, and this has mightily confused him now. I have a dream this nation will rise up, live out the true meaning of its creed. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal. The pandemic is over. We still have a problem with COVID. We're still doing a lot of work on it. But with all due respect, that's a bunch of malarkey. I've said it before and I'll say it again.

Democracy simply doesn't work. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. That's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson and Charles C. W. Cook, sitting in for Rob Long. I'm James Lylex, and today we talk to Toby Young in England about his problems with PayPal, and Troy Senec about his new book about the Man of Iron. So let's have ourselves a podcast. I can hear you! Welcome, everybody. It's the Ricochet Podcast, number 611.

That's the number you dial when you want to get really good conversation. Because Ricochet is the most interesting, stimulating, safe. Did I say safe? No, it's not safe sometimes. But it's a great place to go and argue. And you can go to Ricochet.com, join, and you will find the community that you've been looking for on the web all of these years. I'm James Lilex in Minneapolis, which is suddenly a tumble. Charles C.W. Cook is in Florida. He's sitting in for Rob Long.

Lord knows where Rob is. And Peter is in California. And we have with us, let's go right to him, Toby Young. We just had Toby talking about the queen. And now, unfortunately, we have to talk to him about some sort of financial strictures that have been placed on him by, get this, big tech. Toby Young is the founder and director of the Free Speech Union. He runs the Daily Skeptic

and is the associate editor of The Spectator, co-host of Ricochet's London Calling podcast. Welcome, Toby. I was looking last night at my PayPal account, which I have, and wondering whether or not something that I wrote seven years ago would be brought to their attention by somebody with an ax to grind, and all of a sudden my money would disappear, and all my funding would dry up, and my access to the system would be denied. And I'd have absolutely no idea why other than I would probably have to find a version of Kafka's doorman standing by the door to let me in at some point to learn from the magistrate what I have done. But of course, that day would never come. Welcome and tell us what happened.

Thanks, James. what I have done but of course that day would never come welcome and tell us what happened thanks James um yeah well I assumed that um I couldn't be cancelled because I'd already been cancelled so I was cancelled at the beginning of 2018 lost it's like COVID immunity right right I thought I thought you know um what more dirt is there to dig up on me it's all been dug the offense archaeologists have done their worth uhologists have done their worst and I lost five positions at the beginning of 2018 and I thought that effectively made me bulletproof. That immunised me against future cancellation but apparently not because last week I got a message on my personal PayPal account saying that they had closed it because I was in breach of their acceptable use policy and that meant the funds in the account about 600 pounds were frozen they said in case they needed to extract damages for violating this policy but they didn't give me any more detail than that it was actually worse than kafka's trial james because

i'd been accused tried convicted and sentenced with no possibility of parole all at once, all in one fell swoop. And I hope you can't hear my dog barking there. Anyway, that was bad enough. There was £600 in my account. I couldn't get it out. But it wasn't the end of the world. I hardly ever used my personal PayPal account. Then a few minutes later, I got another email, another message rather from PayPal, saying that it had closed the account linked to the Daily Skeptic, which is the skeptical website I set up two and a half years ago, and about a quarter of our donors regularly donate using PayPal. So that was a bit of a headache. And then the bombshell dropped. A few minutes after that I got another notification

that PayPal had closed down the account linked to the Free Speech Union, the organisation I set up in 2020 to protect people from being cancelled, to come to their defence if they're targeted for cancellation. And about a third of our 9,500 dues-paying members are paying their dues using PayPal as the payment processor. So that was a disaster. And, you know, I contacted PayPal to try and find out why. What exactly have I done wrong? No light was thrown on it by any of the customer service agents I spoke to. I wrote to the CEO of PayPal UK. Didn't reply. I wrote to the corporate affairs offices in the US and the UK. No reply. So I'm still in the dark about exactly what I did wrong. But I'm not the

only one to be singled out in this way. We discovered this week that an organisation called Us4Them, which was set up by three mums during the lockdown over here to try and campaign for, lobby for the reopening of schools, because schools were closed. For some reason paypal has decreed them to be beyond the pale too and i don't know if you saw but on tucker carlson a few days ago he interviewed the founder of um gays against groomers an lgb group which opposes the teaching of gender ideology in high schools to children and curiously uh gays against groomers discovered that paypal is actually hasn't demonetized a site called prostasia which includes a support group for minor attracted people so

apparently it's okay um to have a support group for minor attracted people but if you want to defend people for expressing controversial points of view in the public square that's beyond the pale as far as paypal is concerned and i think it's a really sinister development i mean it's you know we've seen this kind of thing in canada with justin trudeau uh freezing the bank accounts of the truckers involved in the freedom convoy and we've seen other people being demonetized blocked cancelled by big tech before but i think this is the first time a financial services company has demonetized an organization not for expressing contentious points of view which it disapproves of but merely for defending people who want to do that perfectly

lawful points of view so i think this is a new low in the um dramatic and rapid introduction to a Chinese-style social credit system. Well, you're a denier and a phobe, obviously, back there somewhere. It's only a chance of getting you to the matter of getting you to room 101 and to admit what you're denying and what you're phobic about. Peter, Charlie, I just want to go back over this very, very briefly to make sure I understand one point. You have 600 quid in your personal account? Yes. Which is now frozen? Correct.

But I have been able to get the money out of the Daily Skeptic account and the Free Speech Union account. So the only frozen account, the only account I can't get my money out of is my personal account. So they, I suppose they could say it's frozen rather than that they've taken it, but that 600 quid is no longer usable by you, the man to whom it supposedly belongs, correct? That's correct. All right, so as far as I can tell, that's an act of theft, as far as I can tell. You haven't, it is, okay, I have a question for Charlie, but I'm going to tell an anecdote to pilot on top of Toby.

What, this is not as outrageous as what Toby has undergone, although in some ways it's even more outrageous. I did an interview in the middle of the lockdown with Scott Atlas, Dr. Scott Atlas, and Scott Atlas raised some questions about whether schools should be closed. By the way, two years later, we now know questions about whether schools should be closed. By the way, two years later, we now know that schools should not have been closed. Even Randy Weingarten, the chair of the biggest teachers union in this country has said, well, we did the best we could,

but she's admitting it was a terrible, tragic, all the, all right. So Scott was saying something that was true and now understood to be true. And YouTube left the interview up for, I think it was six or seven months, and then President Trump named Scott Atlas to a position in the White House, and I'm going to impute to Toby my views because I've listened to him long enough on London Calling to feel that I do know his general views. We are people who believe in free markets. We believe that private companies ought to behave the way private companies wish to behave, that strictly speaking in this country, Britain does not benefit from a First Amendment, but freedom of speech, strictly speaking, does not bind private entities such as YouTube or PayPal. But you know what, Charlie? I got so angry I could barely see for the fortnight that it took for YouTube to explain what we needed to do to put up some kind of statement that we didn't associate ourselves with. Unbelievable. That is somehow or other

our own classically liberal view about what private entities ought to be able to do. Turns out to be inadequate? Well, I don't know what the word would be but toby are you uh it feels to me as though i'm being forced to rethink my fundamental view about the way corporations ought to be permitted to behave charlie will now tell me what the correct answer is well i view these two questions as being separate or at least that the answers to them are different. Do you see that fine lawyer-like mind? He's already creating distinctions, Toby. I mean, there is a distinction. I'll tell you why.

Because I think that YouTube is ultimately a website. It's like Ricochet. It's like Twitter. It's like the BBC or National Review. The internet is a decentralized, deregulated network. And the purpose of it is to allow anyone to plug a computer into a switch, which is connected to the backbone infrastructure, and advertise their services, whether they're paid for or not.

And the fact that consumers have over time chosen to centralize a lot of their activity by using Gmail or YouTube is a choice. There's no barrier to entry that would prevent some other email service or video service, audio service from popping up. So while I share your distaste for the way YouTube behaves and for that matter, Facebook and Twitter and others, I think it's important that the right of free speech accrues to the website and not the user in that case. But banks don't work like that. Banks are not only extremely heavily regulated, but they require licenses. They require charters. They require great seals. There is a whole permission structure around banks. And PayPal is no different. And we regard PayPal now and its equivalents as sort of part of the way the web works. started by Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, they had two different companies they combined, it was not at all obvious that it would get regulatory approval because there was a real problem with trust, there was a problem with security.

It did get regulatory approval, but unlike YouTube, which never had to ask, unlike Twitter or Facebook, which never had to ask, that process was complicated. It was convoluted. They had to go to Washington. They had to talk to the agencies. They had, in some cases, to have laws passed that altered the relationship and the details of our banks to telecommunications. So for PayPal to say, we have the right to discriminate politically, we have the right to determine who we want on our platform and who we don't, outside of elementary questions like legality. And obviously there are laws and should be laws allowing PayPal or Chase or JP Morgan or Barclays Bank to kick off Al-qaeda if people are sending money around to make bombs or what you will but to uh to have an organization such as that which is a

creation of the state and which is very closely regulated by the state to be claiming the same sort of latitude that say ricochet.com could to me is preposterous and and i i wholly support um strict regulation of this to ensure viewpoint neutrality and where it doesn't exist currently i think it should yeah can i just come in on the back of that peter i think um in answer to your fundamental challenge which is well what about PayPal's right to freedom of association? I don't think we'd extend that right for it to say well if it doesn't want to give people of colour, it doesn't want to extend its services to people of colour that's fine because it has freedom of association. We'd want to impose some restrictions on whom it can discriminate against.

And I think that just as it shouldn't be able to discriminate against people on the basis of colour, creed, etc., similarly it shouldn't be able to discriminate against people on the basis of their political beliefs. That's discrimination. And if the company was UK headquartered, which it isn't, PayPal Europe, which is the entity that has closed down my accounts, is headquartered in Luxembourg, which means that the Equality Act, which is a kind of catch-all piece of anti-discrimination legislation passed in 2010 in the UK, and which would prevent a company headquartered in the UK from discriminating against a customer on the basis of that customer's political beliefs, it's exempt from that law because it's headquartered in Luxembourg, perhaps intentionally. But I do think, I agree with Charlie, that when it comes to companies providing financial services, particularly banking services, there ought to be a regulatory

or legal prohibition on discriminating against people on the basis of their political beliefs, provided their political beliefs are completely lawful. My political point of view should be a matter of complete indifference to PayPal and not something it penalizes me for. So is this another reason? Have we stumbled across another example of why your country, both of you charlie and toby was at least for some some indeterminate amount of time until charlie citizenship finally comes citizenship finally comes through five years ago five years ago oh you're oh really he wasn't definitely he wasn't at the party i guess all right we won't go into it. All right. So, Toby, this is why Brexit was quite right, because Europe simply has different values

about things including freedom of speech. That is to say, Britain already passed legislation that would have made this kind of thing illegal. PayPal is operating as a European entity, and therefore what it just did to you, shutting you down, reflects a certain European consensus view about what is and isn't permissible. Europeans are much more, continental Europeans are much more comfortable with saying what may and may not be said, and who may and who may not do business because of their political views. Well, I referred... I'm trying to toss you a softball.

Yeah. Now you're going to tell me that's a stupid question. I was pro-Brexit, and partly because I didn't want Britain to be tangled up in laws made in Brussels or EU red tape. But even though one of the reasons PayPal can do this is because it's not within scope of the Equality Act, bringing it within scope of the Equality Act wouldn't necessarily solve the problem. So it's not a particularly robust law that liberals should celebrate because it also prohibits various kinds of discrimination in such a way that it can be weaponized to shut down

people with perfectly seemingly perfectly legal but disagreeable opinions so on camp on university campuses in the UK for instance trans rights activists have invoked the Equality Act to claim that if you invite a gender critical feminist to speak that is going to that is going to create a hostile environment on the campus for trans people and that is a breach of the university's public sector equality duty as set out in the equality act so the problem with the equality act is that's something to rely on to protect us from this kind of thing happening again is that it doesn't say the courts must give priority to not discriminating against people on the basis of their religious or political beliefs it just says it has to at the moment it just says to

companies you need to balance not discriminating against them on that basis but also not creating a hostile or discriminatory environment for other people and they often give priority to the latter and not the former well the the way to fix that in my view is to invert the legal process such that any bank that is operating in the united kingdom or that transacts in pounds which is another way of creating a territorial rule can only kick somebody off its platform subject to a court order. I mean, it's not too difficult to get a court order if PayPal is being used to send money around to make bombs. It's not too difficult to get a court order if there is pending civil litigation. It would be pretty difficult to

get one for you, Toby, because you haven't broken the law and i mean i understand that there may not be the political will to do that but that's the easiest way of fixing this is just to say we will limit this to illegal activity and illegal activity will be reviewed by a court before the action is taken not afterwards yeah i mean that that sounds like quite a good solution we're exploring various legislative and regulatory remedies at the moment and um we did there does seem to be quite a lot of political support for reining in companies like paypal and stopping them from doing this kind of thing again particularly within the current government so an mp asked asked a question in the house of commons about this uh yesterday and um the leader of the house was responded quite warmly and said that there

ought to be a debate about it and we've put together a letter signed by about 39 MPs and peers including a former leader of the Conservative Party urging the Financial Conduct Authority and the Prudential Regulation Authority a a couple of financial regulators, to investigate this and do something about it and recommend legislative and regulatory solutions. So there does seem to be a bit of political will to get something done. And I'm hoping PayPal are going to rue the day they picked a fight with me because we're going to make their lives a misery. Good. There needs to be a line. It needs to be codified. And we need to know exactly where they stand on these things. Because, Toby, you said before that political speech, of course, should be permitted unless it's illegal, which is true. But then you also noted the way that the Equality Act is being used by trans activists to say that speech is harmful, it is violent and therefore should be denied.

So obviously, when you look at the left, you see the twilight of permissible dialogue. You see the twilight of the end of free speech because they're eager to move to a point where speech is prescribed because it either is unfortunate or it contradicts what they say to be unassailable notions that any idea or argument contrary to them constitutes violence. So what do you think it was? What do you think you said at some point that got you in this pickle? That's my last question. Well, there was an article in the Times of London a couple of days ago, and the reporter had evidently spoken to someone at PayPal and they told him that the reason my Daily Skeptic account had been closed is because it traffics in COVID vaccine misinformation and the other accounts because I'm linked to all three and so that may be the reason but it wasn't the reason given and it hasn't been given to us as the reason and PayPal pointedly weren't quoted even you know on background giving that reason in

the time so it sounds like a smear that they wanted to disseminate and use the times to do so but it may well be that someone in the company decided that expressing any skepticism, raising any reservations at all about the efficacy and safety of the mRNA COVID vaccines constituted misinformation. Well, I think your piece that you did run in The Skeptic about how a good treatment for it is drinking raw HP sauce was wrong in the face of it, and I can see now why they tossed you out. That actually works. It probably does, if you inject it directly in. Toby, good luck, and keep us posted. Again, we hope to speak to you next time when we've got something great

other than a monarch who's passed, and a website that's been demonetized. Victories to come, we hope. Toby Young, of course you can listen to him on the podcast, linked at this very page, and our regards to Blighty, we hope. Toby Young, of course, you can listen to him on the podcast, linked at this very page. And our regards to Blighty, as ever. Thank you. Yeah, it's bad when you get cut off from your source of money.

But even if you have your source of money, you're always wanting to save a little more, aren't you? Right? Somewhere Rob Long, listening to this podcast, is just itching to just burst through the fourth wall and interrupt what I'm about to say. He can't, because I'm here to tell you about upside. Saving money, wouldn't you like to? You've been to the pump lately, you cringe when you see what the price is. You go to the restaurant, you look at the check, your eyes pop out. You go to the grocery store, you look at what things were as compared to what they were

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And now we welcome to the podcast, Troy Sinek. Welcome back, that is. Troy is an author, former White House speechwriter, co-founder of Kite and Key Media, which is a great site, wonderful YouTube videos, until they get kicked off, that explain things in ways that just make sense. And he co-hosts the Law Talk podcast as well. He's just released his book, A Man of Iron, Determining Life and Improbable Presidency of... Who is that man of iron? It's got to be Bismarck, right? No, it's got to be some steely source of American erect... It's Grover Cleveland, the improbable presidency there. And Troy, welcome. We understand you have breaking news from the 1880s. Yeah, this was a tough act to follow. I mean, between Toby having the news

of the day and also that you never want to follow a guy with an English accent. Plus, I've got Charlie, my flat sort of redneck California timbre will do its best. But thank you guys for having me back. So let's talk about Cleveland. You know, I think somewhere there's a Simpsons sketch about the caretaker presidents that we always forget. And they trot up, you know, Grant and McKinley and the rest of them. A lot of people don't know very much about Grover Cleveland other than his first name is now attached to him up. And his last name is a city we regard as a symbol of Rust Belt decline. So why should he be elevated as such? Why should people say, you know what, I've had enough of Chester A. Arthur. I want to hear more about this Cleveland guy. Also, for the record, James, there is a Simpsons episode where Grandpa Simpson

refers to being spanked by Grover Cleveland on two non-consecutive occasions. There are... Well, he was wearing onions on his belt. He was a child at the time. There are three major reasons that I wanted to write this book. The first of which is that we have had 45 men serve as president of the United States. The numbers are screwed up, by the way, because of Grover Cleveland. He's the reason that you always have to subtract one because we count him as 22 and 24. But 45 is the important number to keep in mind. Of that group, there have only been 14 who've actually done a full eight years, less than a third. And if we were to go through that

list, they're the presidents that even if you're not a history buff, you know, you regard as the sort of the household names, the presidency. So one, it was just Cleveland deserves a rehabilitation of the type that Calvin Coolidge got, for instance, from Amity Shlaes' book. And Cleveland, you know, is not that much further in the past than Coolidge. He gets elected president the first time in 1884, his second term's in 1892. But he is a more antique figure to most Americans, and I think harder for a lot of conservatives or classical liberals to get their heads around, partially because he's a Democrat. He's the last sort of Jeffersonian classical liberal Democrat. And that tension, that transition is actually happening during his presidency. I mean, one of the ironies of

the fact that he is being analogized to Donald Trump right now because of the prospect that Trump will run a third presidential campaign is positionally they were sort of opposites historically insofar as Donald Trump comes into a fairly, at least rhetorically, limited government Republican Party and starts moving it in a populist direction. And Cleveland comes in as a classical liberal Democrat and is fighting an ascendant populist wing, best embodied by the likes of William Jennings Bryan, who becomes the presidential nominee three of the next four cycles after Cleveland. So you're saying that it's during the administration of the two administrations of Grover Cleveland that the Democratic Party goes bad. It does. It does. And the irony of.

But it wasn't his fault. It wasn't his fault. Well, we'll put an asterisk next to that because Grover Cleveland should come in for some criticism as a political matter, if not an ideological matter. But, you know, the irony, again, with the Trump comparison is Cleveland is really yesterday's man, even the first time that he is in his first term as president of the United States. And the only reason that he is able to come back, run for a third time in 1892, is because he exists in an era prior to the modern presidential primary. I mean, all the energy in the Democratic Party of his era is on the popular side. It's on the free silver side. We don't need to get into 19th century monetary policy. But Cleveland comes out in the years between his two terms, writes a forceful open letter and says this will be

catastrophic for the party. It'll be catastrophic for the country. Well, how do you get re-nominated once you've just defied your party's base? Because it didn't matter. He didn't have to face a primary electorate. And the sorts of men who went to the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1892, the party insiders who were tasked with making this choice said, well, here's an adult. Here's a guy who's not going to crash the American economy for fun and profit. And this is how Grover Cleveland gets a third nomination. Totally different than what a Donald Trump or anybody else in the future would have to do here. Cleveland didn't have to worry, given the politics of the day, about playing that closely to the base. I'm going to limit myself to one question because you and I are going to record

an hour on this for Uncommon Knowledge early next month, I think, as we finally got a date, I believe. We've got that sorted. But the question is this. You place Grover Cleveland. He's a sepia-tinted figure. He does not come to us in color. He is a figure of the past. You just said that. Yeah, that's right. And yet, it's impossible to read the book without feeling that you enjoy his company. You not only admire him as a matter of principle, you like the man. And by the way, my test of whether a biography does all that a biography should or not is whether after reading it, you can say to yourself, I think I know what it would have been like to sit at table with that man for dinner or

for a drink. And your book succeeds beautifully in that regard. And I can't quite figure out how you do it because it's a political history. Just tell us a little bit about Grover Cleveland the man and why in some strange way, although he's a figure of the almost irremediably distant past in some funny way i don't think he ever appeals appears in any newsreels we have grover cleveland in newsreel we don't have i beg your pardon we have uh calvin coolidge in newsreel we have grover cleveland only in black and white photo he's he's he's a different era but he's still somehow you can still almost reach out and shake his hand yeah that's right he is the last president for whom we do not have a recording of his voice ironically if you go online you will you will find things purporting to be clips of his his voice that are in fact clips

of william jennings bryan which is a real wound you know to the legacy of Grover Cleveland. And no, no video either, although I think there's some very, very vintage footage where he appears sort of deeply in the background and almost useless. You asked about who he is as a person. He's very unusual. He's very unusual for a president. I say in the book that one of the things that makes him so strange, especially by comparison to modern politicians, is that we are very used in this day and age to seeing politicians who have the sort of raw, climbing the greasy pole political skills that one needs to get to higher office and then once they acquire that

higher office do not have any of the prerequisites of statesmanship that we would hope one would have at that level in cleveland cleveland we don't have that much time how many members of congress are there um cleveland is so peculiar because he is the opposite of this and this is this is a guy who really doesn't have a recognizable uh certainly doesn't have a recognizable legislative temperament but doesn't even really have a recognizable executive temperament you know his background is as a, and the more that you parse his life, the more it feels like you are watching the ascendancy of a Supreme Court justice. Insofar as the way that he conceives of the world and the way that he engages even with electoral politics and public policy is not manipulating a faction here, doing some horse trading here. It's always establishing the first principle, establishing what the right thing to do is, regardless of how much popularity it has

within his party or with the broader electorate, and just going full tilt. This is one of the reasons that the book is called A Man of Iron, which is a paraphrase of a characterization of him by H.L. Mencken. This is a man who did what most of us in shorthand would say that we want an American president to do. He started every consideration of every public policy issue with the question, what is the right thing to do? And his answer to that always came from this sort of deeply classical liberal framework. The right thing to do was always to protect the money of the taxpayers. The right thing to do was always to treat every American equally before the law and not give special favors to whether they were

business interests or whether they were pensioners who were trying to get extractions that they probably shouldn't have from the federal treasury. This is the way that this man conceives of the world. And one of the reasons that I wanted to write the book, he is regarded by a lot of political scientists and historians as naive on this front. He is also sort of worshipped by a lot of libertarian types on this front. And what I wanted to accomplish with the book is to convey that they both have a point. Insofar as, like many people, Grover Cleveland's greatest strengths are also some of his greatest weaknesses. I mean, all of this behavior is deeply admirable. It also, in many cases, works to his political disadvantage. So I wanted people to understand that if you have an idealistic view of politics

and your view of the American political landscape today is jaundiced, that there are counterexamples. There are people who come into office and govern according to principle, but that's also tougher sledding than one might imagine at first, particularly in Cleveland's second term, which is really rocky. Troy, since we want to sell some books here, you're going to have to discuss the sex scandal. But first, our fellow American, Charlie Cook. Well, I want to know, who was he before he was president? So a year before he runs, you say to the average American, Grover Cleveland, and do they say, oh yeah, that guy, is he completely unknown?

Where did he come from? A year before he runs, there's some recognition, but not much further before that. In fact, when Grover Cleveland gets sworn in for the first time in 1885, he records that the thought that is dominant in his head that day is that four years prior, when Garfield would have been being sworn in, that there was no way that James Garfield had any idea who he was. Because Grover Cleveland, if you locate him in the year 1881, which is the year he turns 44 years old, he is a relatively anonymous lawyer in Buffalo, New York. He had held one elected office prior to that as the sheriff of Erie County, where Buffalo is located. He had been out of that office for the better part of a decade. He gets elected mayor of Buffalo in 1881, governor of New York in 1882, president of the United States in 1884. So this is one of the great sort of meteoric rises in American political history. And it is at the risk of oversimplifying it. It largely owes to the fact that if you think about the moment we're in in history here, post-Civil War, Reconstruction, widespread Republican dominance at the federal level, which results in what I call in the book

sort of the political equivalent of gout. Times are too good for the Republicans who are controlling everything. There is a lot of corruption that sets in. This is a big sort of party-splitting debate within the Republican Party as to what kinds of reforms or whether they should be pursuing reforms at the federal level. And Cleveland, from the very start of his career, when he's first running for mayor of Buffalo, comes in and says a Democratic thief is no better than a Republican thief. He is running against corruption on both sides. He's usually, by the way, running in venues where the Democrats are in a slight minority. And so this is sort of the secret to the entire political rise. He's always a Democrat who is moving up with a contingent of reformist Republicans who have felt blocked out of their own party. And that is why it happened so quickly. I'm not sure that if you if you move the calendar five years in one direction or five years in the other, I'm not sure his political career happens. Because this is not deeply choreographed. In fact, he is sort of drafted for offices at the

start of his career that no one else wants. It's just the way that his disposition and his ideology sort of interacts with the politics of the day. I don't think this is a guy that you would have seen having a successful political career if it had started in the 1870s or in the 1890s. He just fits the moment. I have another question if I have time. The only thing you need to bear in mind is that it is your question that stands between our audience and hearing about the sex scandal. All right, well, I'll ask it it quickly then and i'll hope my question isn't also the answer to the sex scandal question why man of iron a man of iron is a paraphrase

uh of a quotation from from mencken who refers to you there are a lot of references at the time to cleveland's iron will because as i say he just he set his mind to something and he was so grounded in his principles that every metaphor one seems to reach for in the late 19th century about Grover Cleveland involves some sort of metal. He's a man. He's a man of iron. There's another Minkin quote where he refers to him as a steel ship loaded with, I think, monoliths of granite. But not a man of silver. Not a man of silver. Not a man of silver.

And, of course, the deep irony of this is that if one were to cover the book as a shot of Cleveland's face, if one were to see a shot of Cleveland's entire body, metal is not necessarily the first thing that comes to mind. He weighed in at about 275 pounds. He's our second heaviest president behind Taft. And you do see these references scattered throughout the histories of the era to things like his shapeless hands. Those are the kinds of things you'll hear members of Congress saying. And they're not wrong. I mean, if you look at photographs of Grover Cleveland, one of the most famous when he's running for reelection, you look at the man's hands, it does look a bit like when a child blows up a surgical glove. I mean, this is not an unfair characterization, but that is the title and that sentiment is all about character and about the fact that this man was dug in when he really believed in something. Okay, so how did a man of such sterling, ha ha ha, I'm in on the silver joke too, how did a man of such sterling character get himself so thoroughly, the sex stuff and the marriage are all a little weird, Troy. All a little weird, all a little weird. All right, over to you stipulated weird but uh oversold or at least imprecisely sold in the popular imagination so the sex scandal grover cleveland when he is first running for president in 1884 shortly after he gets the democratic

presidential nomination and it bears noting that groverver Cleveland is still a bachelor at this point, has yet to be married. And a story breaks in a newspaper in Buffalo suggesting, first of all, that Grover Cleveland is just in general a morally dissipated individual who has a serious drinking problem, is commiserating with prostitutes. But the real meat of this story is that he had supposedly seduced this young woman, impregnated her, abandoned her and the child after supposedly having promised to marry her. And this isn't even the electric part of it. The electric part is, in the allegations of the newspaper story, Cleveland then becomes concerned about the implications of this for his future political career.

And as one would do, has the child abducted from her and has her committed to an asylum? There are elements of this that are true. There are elements of it that are wildly exaggerated, and there are elements of it that are outright false. What is true is that he did have a relationship with this woman. It did produce a child. We are not entirely certain to this day whether it was actually his, but gun to my head, weak salary, I would bet that it probably was. The more lurid allegations are sort of a misinterpretation of things that happened afterwards. And the people who peddled them originally knew that they were incorrect, which is the woman involved had a fairly serious drinking problem. And Cleveland turned to a retired judge in Buffalo who was on the board of a local orphanage and asked him to look in on the situation and make a determination as to whether this child was safe in this environment.

The judge determined no. And the judge convinced the mother that the child would be better off put up for adoption, put into an orphanage and then put up for adoption. And the mother accepts some money to go start a new life in Niagara Falls. These lurid allegations in this story come from what happens afterwards. Is the child taken from her? Well, kind of, because she comes back down, having regretted the decision that she's made, and steals the child from the orphanage. The authorities from the orphanage have to come get it back. Is she institutionalized? Well, kind of. She is sent to

a facility that does treat mental illness, but it's a sanitarium. It's institutionalized? Well, kind of. She is sent to a facility that does treat mental illness, but it's a sanitarium. It's also treating alcoholism, which is her problem. And she's there voluntarily for about 10 days, leaves in her own accord. So that's the story as Grover Cleveland has to deal with it in 1884. And then there's this little asterisk afterwards. It was a historical asterisk until about 10 years ago. And now, if one is to Google questions about Grover Cleveland's sex life and the more illicit parts of it, one will be confronted with widespread allegations that Grover Cleveland was a rapist because there was a single book came out about a decade ago that made this case i won't go through it in excruciating detail but what all this comes down to is that at the end of the campaign these charges were renewed with the additional claim the woman the first presidential campaign yes and in 1884 uh with with an affidavit supposedly issued from this woman claiming that she was raped, which seems like a plausible case to make, right? And she comes forward. The reason that this was not career-ending for Grover Cleveland in 1884,

which one would assume in Victorian America that plausible rape charges would do it, is that she came forward in the press a few days later and told a journalist, I did sign this. I never read it. I had been told that I was actually signing a document in defense of Grover Cleveland, and I was tricked by a friend, and I have nothing negative to say at this point. This is why this issue does not reemerge until 2010 or 2011 when this book comes out so if you've heard the story about grover cleveland as a rapist unlike the one about the illegitimate child there is just no evidence to support any of that you have to admit that ma ma where's my pa gone to the white house ha ha ha here's the let's go brandon of the day a national a national catch

phrase if you will hey before before we let you go and everybody should read the book man of iron and learn more about cleveland so that you can you know subject comes up you can root about your extensive newly acquired knowledge we talked about your new venture key and kite kite and key kite and key well you know keen kite kite and key is there is your kite and key is there a key and kite, kite and key. Is there, is your kite and key, is there a key and kite out there that's doing the exact opposite of what you're doing? How's it going? And what's coming up next? It's going, it's going really well. We've been really pleased with the reception that we've gotten because that, you know, the whole idea

behind this, both my co-founder and I being former think tank executives, when you're at a think tank, as Peter well knows, what gets defined as a win in any given day is, you know, a scholar has a good conversation with a member of Congress. A scholar has a piece in the Wall Street Journal. Important, valuable things to be sure. But when we would have those kinds of successes back when I was at the Manhattan Institute, one would go home and find that it didn't mean a damn thing amongst your friends or family who, to the extent that they knew anything about these same public policy issues, were getting their information from Twitter or TikTok or Instagram. And so the idea was to take the kinds of work being done in think tanks, present it with a sense of rigor and intellectual responsibility, but do it in a way that would be accessible for a layperson. And we've had a tremendous reaction to it, much more than we actually anticipated. And you asked what's next. We just released a video yesterday, which has gotten a very good reception, on the topic of mass psychogenic illness. Basically, these outbreaks of people believing that they're sick.

It's the opposite of the placebo effect. It's the nocebo effect. Believing that they're sick and actually, because they believe they're sick, manifesting actual symptoms. But there's no underlying problem. And the reason that we made this video now is this is a thing that has gone on forever. This is at the root of the medieval European dancing hysterias. This is at the root of the Salem witch trials. That and a little ergo and the wheat.

Right, right. Well, this is right. This is debated, actually, on that topic. But what makes this so interesting is just in the last few years, for the first time, we've started to see signs that this stuff can now spread online. Right. I saw that social contagion of ideas as people. germane to a lot of the arguments that we're having, that people are saying that this explosion of gender, new gender theory, that this explosion of new gender identities is coming from people who are just absolutely marinating 24-7 social media and finding in these different identities a new way to make themselves special. Social contagion has been debunked as a reason for sudden teen

gender on-set dysphoria syndrome or whatever the particular acronym is. But you're saying that actually, no, it's not just gender ideas. It's physical ailments. It's the whole mental construct of people when they're no longer in meat space in the real world, but wired into this anxiety machine that comes through them on their little glowing rectangle that there actually is sickness, physical, actual sickness to come from spending too much time online. And I don't just mean the neck ache that I have today. Yeah, that's right. I mean, the example of this, where they have the most research is that in the last few years, there's been this enormous spike in kids presenting with what appears to be Tourette's syndrome. And the reason that they knew that it wasn't authentic is because when they put these kids through the diagnostics, they weren't actually displaying

the symptoms that would be consistent with Tourette's syndrome. They were displaying symptoms that were consistent with the Tourette's influencers on TikTok and YouTube who had these very specific phrases that they used that the kids were just miming. Whereas if you had a real case of this, you would have your own text that would be unique and distinctive to you. And this is the first time that there's really been sort of lengthy empirical research to show that now we can see it being transmitted via social media. And multiple personality disorders too. And I actually don't believe that any of these people who are manifesting these things are actually have a head that is full of you know demons legion numbers of them but it's but there's these whole communities that arise of these people who perform these multiple personalities and bring

out their altars and describe the chorus of things in their head and it is madness i mean so some of this is performative for the sake of establishing yourself as part of this unique new community, is it not? But you're saying that people actually get physically sick. What diseases are they getting? Can you get cirrhosis of the liver from Twitter? I think you can because it drives you to drink. But I mean, what illnesses are you... You know what? I'm going to stop there and say, no, watch the video, everybody. Good man. Well done, James. Kite, give us the URL, if you would.

Kiteandkeymedia.com. And you can find us, ironically enough, given the conversation, on all of those same social media channels we were just discussing. As well you should. Man of Iron, the turbulent life and improbable presidency of Grover Cleveland. The latest by Troy Sinek, as well as the videos from kite and key thanks for joining us today appreciate it troy we hope to talk to you again soon thank you very much appreciate it uh you know we have mon frequently he just gets better and better and better he does what else gets better and better and better he does which is really the most basic low effort segue i've ever done in my life but i'm here to tell you that some things do. You know, I got a leather jacket that I'm going to have to bring out pretty soon

because it's cold here in Minnesota. All of a sudden it's fall and I'm not happy about it. But at least I know I've got that great jacket that's so well weathered. And you know what? I got solid wood furniture, arts and crafts style. It just gets better with the patina of age as well. Did you ever think that, oh, I don't know, bed sheets could be on that list? And you would say, yes, I would because I've heard this spot before.

But if you are a bowl and branch user and customer, you know exactly what I'm talking about, don't you? Bowl and branch sheets, they're not just buttery and breathable and impossibly comfortable. No, they get better with every wash. But what about the thread count, James? Get out of here with your thread count. Bowl and branch gives you thread quality. It doesn't matter how many threads your sheets have

if they aren't the best threads possible. And I'm here to tell you that these, well, they have to be the best threads possible because once again, as with last week, my sheets are better than they were last week. They've been subjected to the pounding of the washing machine, to the agitation of the dryer and the rest of it. No, the washing machine has the agitator. Point is, wash them again and they're even better. Signature hemmed sheets from Bolland Branch, they're best seller for a very good reason, and you will immediately feel the difference. From there, the sheets just get softer and softer with every wash. They'll feel buttery to the touch, and they're super breathable, so they're perfect for every season. They're great

for when it's cold. They're great for when it's hot. They're made with threads so luxurious. They are beloved. Well, I'd like to say four, if we included Grover Cleveland, but Bowen Branch was around back then. Three U.S. presidents love men. If the presidents can't convince you, you're not an American. Well, I'm kidding. If the presidents can't convince you, then check out their more than 10,000 stellar reviews. Plus, plus, plus, plus, Bowen Branch gives you a 30-night risk-free trial with free shipping and free returns on all orders. And I'll bet they spend about five cents a year on

free returns because once you try them, you never want to go back. 10% off your first sheets? No, 15% off your first sheets when you use the promo code RICOCHET at BolinBranch.com. That's Bolin Branch, B-O-L-L-A-N-D, branch.com, promo code RICOCH, B O L L A N D branch.com promo code ricochet. And we thank Boland branch for sponsoring this, the ricochet podcast. I got to do some little business here. So Charles, Peter, I know that neither of you want to do this because it's Rob's thing. It's Rob's joint, but I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it quickly. They're about the meetups, the meetups, the ricochet meetups is, you know,

that's where it's at. As they used to say back in the sixtups. The meetups, the Ricochet meetups is, you know, that's where it's at, as they used to say back in the 60s. And where exactly are they at? Well, when you join Ricochet.com, you'll know. We're happy to give you some hints. However, we've mentioned over the last few weeks that events will be going on in Williamsburg, Virginia and Huntsville, Alabama in October. That's right. If you're new to this, there are actual physical meetups between the members and people get together and see each other's faces and chat and have a great time because Ricochet is community and getting together in person is part of community too. We've got one set for New Orleans next year during the French Quarterfest.

Oh boy, bring your beats. I will have another added to the roster soon. She, that's one of our members, will be hosting in Pittsburgh. Exact date's been worked out. It'll be happening sometime in November, early December. Check Ricochet as ever for the details. Now, you might be thinking, that sounds like a lot of fun, but I can't get all the way to those places. Well, it's a big country. We know that. But if our meetup locations are out of reach, you are not doomed to just stay by yourself in your little cubicle and never meet anybody. No, you can join Ricochet. Then you give us a place and time and Ricochet will come to you. And believe me, I've been to a few of these things and they're great. The people that you meet are just fantastic. They uncloak from their online identities and you find all sorts of things about them.

And you know what I found out also is you don't sit around and talk about politics. You talk about all sorts of things because actually Ricochet is about all sorts of things. So for details on these and other Ricochet meetups, go to ricochet.com slash events or find the module, the Ricochet meetup module on the sidebar of the site. Before we go, gentlemen, a couple of things that have come up. I noticed that there seems to be this fbi whistleblower story that's floating out there consigned entirely to what people on the left would consider the illegitimate denier anti-democracy forces of the media so i don't think it's going to get much try it's odd that if trump had sick the the fbi against people in 2020 who were burning cities and trashing federal courthouses. And somebody came out and said, we were commanded to do all sorts of things that I personally cannot believe in.

We had agents taken off of child abuse cases in order to persecute this guy who simply was there at a rally where Antifa happened to be. There would be a hue and a cry and an outcry and a hue and a cry. Rob hates it when we do that, what about, and if it was on the other foot. at a rally where Antifa happened to be, there would be a hue and a cry and an outcry and a hue and a cry. Rob hates it when we do that, what about, and if it was on the other foot. But does this not sort of put the lie to the whole point that the media just calls balls and strikes, that they're for those whistleblowers, they want to root out institutional corruption

and the rest of it? If this guy's right, this story about how the FBI is going against the january 6 people is somewhat concerning charles would you say peter charlie this one's for you well you're talking to someone who wants to abolish the fbi because i don't think it fits well within the american constitutional order so i'm i'm going to be sympathetic to the conceit of the question um i mean i i just think as a as a rule that the fbi and to some extent the doj are going to be political because we have an executive branch that is in charge of them we don't have some

magical fourth branch of government that floats out there and is independent however many times this is insinuated on television and in congress and as such, this sort of behavior is inevitable. Well, we'd like to... Sorry, go on. I don't think there's nothing political about going after bank robbers and that sort of thing. Well, you say that, and there probably is in many ways,

but it's worth pointing out that whether or not it's partisan, it was always political and self-aggrandizing. I mean, if you go back to the early days of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, which, by the way, it's a bit of a warning sign. I mean, his name is still in the building. J. Edgar Hoover was looking for opportunities to create these sort of federal cases. I mean, the Lindbergh baby case actually didn't cross any state lines the justification for all of this innovative police behavior at the federal level was it's a state interstate case well it wasn't so i mean there was politics going on right from the start i have to say my view is shifting at first i i i subscribed i think

probably because i wanted to to andy mccarthy's view that there are a lot of good G-men out there at the FBI. And the problem was that under Mueller and under Comey, the FBI began running operations from Washington, whereas always before it had been field offices who tended to be good guys running operations. Now Washington intervened and that introduced an explicitly political element. All right. Andy knows a great deal and I'm sure that he's right about that much at least. On the other hand, the point that Charlie made about trouble at the FBI from the very get-go, I think often these days, about Judge Lawrence Silberman, who in the 1970s, just a couple of years after J. Edgar Hoover finally died, had the task of reading through Hoover's private papers and described it as the lowest moment in Judge Silberman's otherwise tremendously distinguished career. And he came out of that thinking that at a minimum, the name of J. Edgar Hoover should be chiseled off the front of that building,

that the corruption was endemic, that it spanned decades, that it explicitly involved several presidents. By the way, interestingly enough, Harry Truman would not play ball with J. Edgar Hoover and neither would Dwight Eisenhower, but pretty much every other president. And it reached a peak under the Kennedys and under LBJ, apparently under LBJ above all, says Lawrence Silberman. This is all public. He's written about this. So you get J. Edgar Hoover playing games. It's corrupt from the get-go. Then we come to the Nixon era, and Mark Felt is deep throat. Who's Mark Felt? Mark Felt is an FBI agent, senior official at the FBI, who was passed over to become director. And apparently, he decides to bring down the President of the

United States by leaking to Woodward and Bernstein out of nothing more than professional bureaucratic peak. And then of course, we know about James Comey and the Russia collusion. This is, you know, you have to put a lot of Dillinger's in jail. You have to stop a lot of bank robberies to counterbalance that kind of corruption. And at some point, you just have to say to yourself, I believe, Charlie says it doesn't fit within the constitutional order. I think we're making a related point and maybe in some ways the same point. But the incentives here put an agency in charge of these days all kinds of surveillance we know that they're all right the incentives that sort of the if go to washington and you can see people twitch to to nearness of power the the the the the ability to snitch on to spy on to learn about fellow citizens

and then to keep it all quiet this is just it's just not hell i dislike it more and more and more charlie my fellow american yep no i just i agree i mean and and the argument that that tends to result is practical well what about if there's a bank robber and he's driving along and he crosses a state line yeah okay but you know we did have systems in place for that they were more clunky uh accepted that's not really how the fbi is seen the fbi is seen and we we bolster this in movies as well as the super police right not a not a limited organization that is there to deal with genuine interstate commerce and federal concerns but the super police and you know this is not what they're supposed to be

but it's what they didn't become passively they made themselves under hoover that's what hoover wanted that's a critical point that's a critical point right certainly they should be reformed if you're the crossing state line things you just imagine an fbi agent you know throwing down his hat like boss hog because the boys have gotten across the county line again there was i did forgive me if i'm repeating myself, because I swear that I have. We talked about the FBI last time, but I listen to a lot of old radio, and that includes a show called This is Your FBI, which is a series of cases, totally manufactured, but drawn from the records of the FBI, mind you, in which our agents keep us safe. There's one called The Walkie Talkie Capers, in which these two juvenile delinquents.

Capers? Oh, I love that. That breathes the air of the 40s and 50s. I don't know if this was a caper necessarily. Could have been. There was one who was the typical 50s sneering JD who has contempt for all of authority, and then there was the kid who was drawn into his web, basically innocent, hard-knock life and all the rest of it. They were knocking over warehouses for nylons. Nylons, mind you. And the twist on this, the high-tech twist, was that they were using walkie-talkies to tell you when the police were coming along. The FBI gets involved in two kids in Brooklyn somewhere boosting nylons from a warehouse.

Presumably, I think, because they'd stolen these high-tech walkie-talkies from an army warehouse or something like that. So that gave them the right to do so. But the idea, we were supposed to believe, in the 50s, thanks to this show, was that the FBI was inserting itself, like Charlie said, as super police, into the most molecular-level crimes possible. At the end of the show, after which, of course, Knuckles, the bad guy, was sent unrepentant to the reformatory and the good kid was let off the hook,

we get a message from J. Edgar Hoover, the bad guy was sent unrepentant to the reformatory and the good kid was let off the hook, we get a message from J. Edgar Hoover, who tells us that we are swamped by an epidemic of juvenile delinquency and that the solution to this is to be a better parent. And Hoover then tells the nation a series of bromides about what they can do to make sure that their children are loved, all of which seem like the most basic entry-level requirements for being a parent in the first place. But it's hilarious. Hoover is telling us these things that we should do in order to keep the juvenile delinquents from flourishing. Why this is any of his business, I have no idea. And at the end of the show, they tell you that the voice of J. Edgar Hoover was played by such and such. So apparently, that's the only situation which you can legally impersonate

J. Edgar Hoover. But you're right. I grew up with all of the Ephraim Zimbalist shows, the idea that when the local cops fail, you bring in these guys who've got the, I mean, even special agent Dale Cooper was a hero for some time. And now, by the time Twin Peaks, the return rolls around five years later, the sullied reputation of the bureau makes you sort of wince when he says, I am the FBI. The pride that you used to feel is gone. Well, probably one last thing here we should quickly do before we get out of here. The president has said the pandemic is over. And as is often the case when the president says something, somebody has to walk him back.

I think maybe what the president said was the pandemic is over in Taiwan, which we will defend or not, depending. So what do you guys think um if he if there is no end of the pandemic if it is indeed over then isn't the whole student loan thing illegal then since that was kind of sort of the justification charles i know that you probably are champing at the bit on this one well the student loan thing was illegal before president biden said this because his interpretation of the 2003 heroes act is preposterous and he it, and he should be impeached for it. But that's a conversation for another day. I'm very much in favor of impeaching presidents when they behave like this.

We should impeach more of them. this absurd byzantine reading of this minor law it requires for uh its sustenance there to be an emergency and if there isn't one then you never have to get to the second step the reason though that biden is being corrected here uh is not that he's senile or prone to gaffes, although he is both of those things. It's because he has conflicting prerogatives and he needs to pay lip service to both of them. One prerogative is to tell people that his being president has made things better and to therefore get the pandemic in the rearview mirror because people don't like the pandemic and they think it's over. The other is to keep all of the emergency powers that have accrued to the executive branch in times

of crisis. And so on the one hand, with the midterms coming up, Biden needs to say things like the pandemic is over, you elected me president, and just by sitting in this chair, I have got rid of it. And on the other hand, he or his staff need to say, don't worry, he doesn't mean over, over, and the emergency powers that he enjoys, which are, you know, not just student loans, but student loan deferrals, which are 15 million people on emergency Medicaid, which various border controls, controls over airports and so on. He only has that authority because there's a crisis. So he needs to play both sides of it. And I think that's what we saw.

Peter, do you think those powers will ever be relinquished? When Grover Cleveland is reelected for his third term, ladies and gentlemen, tying it all together. Excellently. So if you had dropped PayPal into that somehow, um, we would have been even happier,

but, uh, you're right. When Grover, when Grover Cleveland or his spiritual inheritor comes back, perhaps. So, uh,

that'll do it for us. It's been a great pleasure, Charles. Thank you for sitting again in for Rob. You can do so anytime, uh, Peter best you in's been a great pleasure. Charles, thank you for sitting again in for Rob. You can do so anytime. Peter, best to you in California. Thank you all. Oh, did I mention that Upside and Golden Branch are our sponsors?

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I'd still bug you about it. That would be great. And if you could join Ricochet.com, that would be the cherry on the entire wonderful confection because, of course, Ricochet.com needs to keep going, and you need to go there, find out what it's all about, and realize, why didn't I do this years ago? Thanks, everybody, for listening,

and we'll see you all in the comments at Ricochet 4.0 next week. Take care. Charlie, take care of Florida for us. I'll do my best. For us Californians, it is plan B. So I've noticed. All right, boys. All right, guys, that was great.

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